Fantasy women’s basketball: What to expect from Brittney Griner in 2023

Brittney Griner is back.

Back in her country. Back in her home. And back in the WNBA, where the three-time All-WNBA first-teamer and her Phoenix Mercury teammates will take the court Friday, May 19, as part of a WNBA opening night quadruple-header.

It has been barely five months since Griner was released from a Russian penal colony, where she was serving a nine-year sentence after pleading guilty to bringing hashish oil into the country. Griner was arrested last February, a week before Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The Joe Biden administration said she had been “wrongfully detained,” and Griner wrote a letter to President Biden saying she was “terrified I might be here forever.” In her first post since she was released in December in a prisoner exchange, she wrote on Instagram that she planned to return to the WNBA.

Now, with the WNBA season about to begin, I’ve been asked to project what Griner’s game and production might look like this year.

To put it mildly, this is a challenging undertaking on many levels. In all honesty, it’s harder than usual for me to separate my analysis from my personal feelings of pulling for her as a person after everything she went through. And the analysis itself is so multilayered that it’s hard to know where to begin.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m nice with the numbers and everything. I can typically explore player history and current circumstances to give a reasonable projection for what their statistics might look like in any given season. Even if they are coming off injury, I can look at other players who have returned from similar injury and use that to shape my predictions.

But this? It’s unprecedented in American professional sports history. So, I’m not going to necessarily attempt the type of specific, line-by-line statistical projections I typically do. Instead, let’s just look together at Griner’s history from a quantitative standpoint, then piece together what we can from various anecdotes and interviews to try to shape the numbers into reasonable estimates.

Where to begin

Start with her typical level before 2022. During the five seasons from 2017 to 2021, Griner’s stats were very consistent, and they were locked at that level in 2021. Here are her averages for the entire five-year span and then for 2021 alone:

Griner 2017-21: 20.6 PPG (55.8 FG%, 81.4 FT%), 7.9 RPG, 2.3 APG, 0.5 SPG, 2.2 BPG, 0.0 3PG in 32.4 MPG

Griner 2021: 20.5 PPG (57.5 FG%, 84.6 FT%), 9.5 RPG, 2.7 APG, 0.4 SPG, 1.9 BPG, 0.1 3PG in 32.8 MPG

Griner was 30 years old during the 2021 season, and the upcoming campaign will be her age 32 season. Longtime teammate Diana Taurasi gave an interview about how Griner’s game looked as of the end of April. Taurasi referenced the rust on Griner’s game, but also indicated that Griner was visibly improving with time.

“Yeah, I think she’s…